The Daily Need

Gogol Bordello released a new music video earlier this week for “Immigraniada (We Comin’ Rougher),” a song performed by lyricist and frontman Eugene Hütz during an interview with Need to Know earlier this summer. In that interview, Hütz explains the lyrics of “Immigraniada (We Comin’ Rougher)” as fighting words that support immigrants in the face of what he calls, “double standards of immigration policies of most hosting countries and the uncompromising belief in a freedom of choice of your residence.”

Last week, The Daily Need brought you the story of Phil Davison, a councilman from the village of Minerva, Ohio, who rocketed to Internet stardom after delivering one of the most intense stump speeches in the history of American politics. Now, some enterprising individual has set that speech against a backdrop of inspirational music and, well, it kind of makes Davison a viable candidate for president of the United States. As Davison told us in an interview last week, he doesn’t have a job, so he’s got plenty of time to mount a national political campaign. And if current polls are any indication, he probably has as much chance of getting elected as Barack Obama.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have announced competing “rallies,” planned for the same day on the national mall. Stewart’s is called the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” and Colbert’s is called “March to Keep Fear Alive.” The news comes in the wave of Glenn Beck’s recent “Restoring Honor” rally, which happened on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

German director Werner Herzog, celebrated art-house auteur and inventive documentarian, can add action-adventure hero to his list of credits. The director of “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” recently recounted the true story of saving Joaquin Phoenix’s life in 2006, when the actor’s car flipped over on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Sascha Ciezata, an animator who recognized the cinematic potential of this mythic tale, illustrated the story and narrated it using Werner’s original audio track. The result is a beautiful and offbeat web short befitting both subjects.

Updated | September 17 President Obama on Friday appointed Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor and vocal critic of Wall Street, to help set up the government’s new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a centerpiece of the financial overhaul passed by Congress earlier this year. Warren first proposed the creation of the new consumer agency, which will consolidate a vast array of regulatory powers across the federal government, and was widely expected to chair the bureau.

Instead, Obama deputized Warren as an assistant to the president and special adviser to the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, allowing her to effectively run the new agency without enduring a bruising confirmation battle in the Senate. Warren, who has been championed by consumer advocates but derided by business groups as a partisan and political neophyte, would almost certainly have faced a filibuster from Senate Republicans.

Students are settling back into college campuses all over country: receiving syllabi, cracking reading lists and (hopefully) attending class. But what about the rest of us? For those inclined to feel nostalgic about this fall ritual, the Interwebs has a solution: In fact, it’s now possible to virtually audit classes all over the country at a fraction of the cost — or really, none of the cost.

Environment:
Part farm, part restaurant and part grocery store, plans for the world’s first Agropolis were unveiled this week in Denmark. With sustainability as the goal, Agropolis would have fish swimming beneath diner’s feet and vegetables growing from the walls. The creators hope that Agropolis, if realized, would function as an ecosystem unto itself.

Need to Know is a production of Creative News Group (CNG) in association with WNET. Marc Rosenwasser is Executive Producer. Need to Know is made possible by Bernard and Irene Schwartz, Mutual of America, Citi Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Foundation, Margaret A. Cargill Foundation, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS.